The man is smart. He’s confident; he’s got the right credentials. Lots of people seem to genuinely like him.

He’s running a school district in a city where many residents, weary of instability and unfulfilled promises at the top, aren’t looking for an action hero at the helm. They just want somebody competent, honest and determined to build on the modest gains DISD has achieved in recent years.

The job certainly isn’t an easy one, but there are plenty of people in this city — including some of our most monied and influential hot dogs — who have genuinely been pulling for Miles to succeed.

Which is why it makes my poor noggin ache to see the man continually distracted and undermined by dumb mistakes he just cannot seem to stop making.

A report forwarded last week to DISD authorities from a legal team headed by former U.S. Attorney Paul Coggins is a case in point. It found no smoking guns and sounded no red-hot alarms. But it found a dispiriting continuation of the disdain for sound advice, the obsession with petty intrigue and the truly awful political misjudgments that have dogged Miles since the day he got here.

This last grassfire was ignited by allegations that Miles tried to steer a contract to a favored vendor and that he bullied a former high-ranking “Cabinet-level” subordinate (he has a lot of trouble keeping Cabinet-level subordinates working for him) over her work performance.

The district’s own lumbering investigative apparatus, the Office of Professional Responsibility, was duly dispatched to investigate these claims. But Miles apparently could not do what you have to do in these cases, even if you think the charges are trumped-up hooey: which is go about your business and let the investigation run its course.

Instead, he jammed a stick into the spokes and stopped the thing dead, even though several district administrators, including lawyers, urged him not to. That’s why the outside investigators Coggins & Co. were brought in.

They cleared him on the big stuff, the steering and the bullying. But in the process, they found that he ran afoul of district policy, and his own contract, by repeatedly trying to yank strings behind the curtain.

The report cites his disruption of the original investigation. It also discloses another embarrassing episode.

In this one, Miles reportedly spent a lot of effort getting (yet another) high-ranking subordinate’s resignation letter ghost-rewritten. The report says Miles orchestrated the rewrite in such a way as to blame everything that has gone wrong since the dawn of the universe on meddlesome and manipulative school board members — his own bosses — and then helped said letter find its way into the public eye.

This report did not have to be a fresh catalog of gaffes. It is sprinkled with useful phrases of exoneration that Miles could today be waving around like semaphore flags, stuff like “no evidence of wrongdoing” and “nothing unusual or suspicious.” Instead, it went on to recount Miles’ ham-fisted efforts to control public perception of his leadership.

“This outside investigation would never have taken place if Superintendent Miles had followed the advice given him … to allow the underlying Office of Professional Responsibility investigation to go forward,” the Coggins report said.

In other words: “Dude, you are shooting your own foot off!”

It’s as if the man were trapped in some extra-galactic time continuum in which he is always shooting his own foot off, in which he focuses with rapt, eternal concentration as the bullet pierces the metatarsus again and again.

Here’s the problem: Mike Miles is temperamentally unsuited to his job.

I don’t mean he isn’t smart or confident. I don’t mean that he isn’t qualified to actually run the district, since he has been so consumed with all these petty imbroglios that it’s hard to tell what his business-as-usual operational performance would look like.

But he is a public administrator. And one thing all good public administrators know is that there are always people in your world — loudmouthed constituents, angry employees, pushy reporters, well-connected big shots, elected officials so dumb that their elevation to authority constitutes a cosmic outrage — who cannot be squashed into submission.

They must be managed. They must be sweet-talked, isolated, flattered, pacified or tactfully neutralized. But you cannot just vaporize anybody who tries to question or criticize or interfere with what you want. They are part of your job, and in a big and contentious government outfit like the DISD, they’re a noisy and visible part.

That’s the part of the job Mike Miles can’t seem to handle. And there’s a sense in the air that unless he wises up in an awfully big hurry, we’re never going to see how he handles the rest.

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